


Backup Day

by Clocksmith



Series: Android!Max [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Android!Max, Cyborg!Chloe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:52:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7566100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocksmith/pseuds/Clocksmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the twenty-eighth of every month, Max gets plugged into a computer so that her memories can be downloaded and stored in a self-contained system for emergencies. A total backup of her experiences, essentially. I thought the idea strange at first; knowing that there is a copy of your life just sitting on a shelf somewhere.</p><p>But I still understand why it happens; if you have the option to copy yourself onto a hard drive in case something happens to you, you might as well go for it. Right?</p><p>Right...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backup Day

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a continuation of my Android!Max AU. I think I'll keep working on this universe, though I'll likely just add new stories to the series instead of adding chapters to existing stories. Either way, I hope you enjoy!

Today marks the end of Backup Day.

Backup Day…

I’m still not sure how to feel about Backup Day.

The idea makes sense. I understand why it happens. I actually appreciate that Max goes through with it as often as she does. It’s just not an event that I’ve ever been privy to before.

On the twenty-eighth of every month, Max gets plugged into a computer so that her memories can be downloaded and stored in a self-contained system for emergencies. A total backup of her experiences, essentially. I thought the idea strange at first; knowing that there is a copy of your life just sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Personally, it would feel a little unsettling. What if those memories are put into someone else? Are they still _me_? Would they think they were the original me?

Would _I_ still be me?

But I still understand why it happens; if you have the option to copy yourself onto a hard drive in case something happens to you, you might as well go for it. Right?

Right. It makes sense, I understand. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to Max and that’s all that matters. It’s completely normal for her. It’s normal for almost every Synth on the planet. Even if I feel strange about it, they feel fine.

As nice as it is that Max gets a failsafe for her head, the other primary feature is to sort all the information that Max has gathered in the month prior and condense it down into something that isn’t quite as easy to remember but is much less taxing on her brain to handle.

Manual long-term memory, she called it. She said it makes her feel imperfect, more human. I just see it as something else I take for granted that Max needs extra technology to accomplish. And even then it puts her out of actions for nearly twenty-six hours.

And today she wants me to be there when she wakes up.

Even if this isn’t a personal thing for her, it means a lot to me that she asked. I’m not sure if it’s the same as waking up from sleep, not really. Max still sleeps. Maybe it’s more like an operation and coming to as the anaesthetic wear off…

Either way, Max said she wanted me to be there when she is reactivated. She wants me there and I can’t help but feel a sheer wave of joy at the thought that someone wants me in their life that way.

But with that also comes an oncoming sense of dread. Max is backed up in her room, which is in her house. It wasn’t until she’d invited me and I replied affirmative that I realised she doesn’t live in any of the dorms at our university.

She lives in an actual house.

With a family.

It wouldn’t be _quite_ so daunting if the family didn’t also belong to her best friend. And as the bus I’m on trundles along the bumpy tarmac of Arcadia Bay, I realise that Chloe is definitely the aspect of the visit that I’m the most afraid of.

Well, perhaps not afraid. Afraid would imply that she’s scary. From everything Max has said to me, she sounds nice.

But as Max’s best friend, Chloe _represents_ something scary; she an important part in Max’s life. She has an influence that goes beyond me. She’s someone that Max has known for most, if not all of her life.

They played together when Chloe was young. They were sharing stories and life experience way before Max even knew I existed. Chloe probably asks about me.

…I wonder how often they talk about me. Will it all be good things?

Will Max have some bad things to say?

…

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overthinking all of this. It just feels like a big milestone, I guess. It’s a step below meeting the parents. And Max lives with Chloe’s parents so maybe I will be meeting her sort-of-but-not-quite-parents and then they’ll ask the questions I don’t-

…

I’m overthinking this.

I’m going Max’s house. I will meet her best friend and I will wait for Max to wake up. It’s not going to be scary and I shouldn’t make it scary. Meeting Max at the café was scary; I had no idea what was going to happen. Anything could have occurred on that day.

Today I know who I will meet and Max will be there after she’s finished with her backup. I don’t need to be scared about anything.

Anxious, that’s fine. I’m allowed to be anxious but I don’t want to be scared.

A particularly deep rut in the road suddenly shifts me as the bus passes over, banging my head against the glass. It doesn’t particularly hurt but it’s enough to bring me back to the real world. I’m meant to be checking my phone for the right stop to get off the bus.

I shift ever so slightly away from the window. I weakly rub the heel of my palm into my head.

It might have hurt a little bit.

Still, things to do.

I glance down at my phone and watch a pulsing red dot move along a thin line of streets with each motion of the bus. I’m apparently four minutes away from my destination. Max added it to my favourites under the name ‘girlfriendz house’ and I didn’t really have the heart to change it, atypical spelling or otherwise.

I might also like that she was the one who named it ‘girlfriendz’ house. It cements our relationship in my head, even if I know we’re in one. I sometimes get too carried away with intrusive thoughts and worries that I forget people genuinely enjoy my company.

Because sometimes I suppose that they don’t. Or maybe I’m not interesting enough for them? Maybe they’d prefer someone who…swears more? Smokes marijuana?

I don’t really know, if I’m being honest. It’s not always logical.

Paranoia isn’t fun. I’m dealing with it, but it isn’t fun.

_Two minutes._

That’s why Max is great, actually. She knows what it’s like.

I’m almost sure that it’s more to do with her relative inexperience with emotions than her core personality, but she can have extreme bouts of paranoia if something goes wrong in her day-to-day life.

I was there when she broke a glass, once. We were in a restaurant and she insisted on taking my tray of leftovers to the recycling unit. Given that she doesn’t eat, she treated me to the whole day, actually. It was nice. Really nice.

But when she picked up my glass she managed to shatter it.

And…she just froze. A member of staff came to clean up the shards and, even while he picked up the pieces with a casual smile on his face, Max looked terrified. Her eyes were completely still.

It was as if she’d just completely shut down. Part of me wondered if she had, at the time.

I thought it might settle down once the waiter left, but when he was gone Max just looked to me and said that we’d probably not be allowed in there again. She thought the manager was going to call the police. She said they’d probably have her decommissioned.

That was probably the first time that I realised I cared for Max. Not just about her, but _for_ her. I cared about her happiness and I cared deeply that she was hurting. Even if I couldn’t make emotions easy for her, I could make that moment in the restaurant hurt less.

In the end I had to actually get the man who’d cleaned the table and have him confirm to her that everything was okay. A few minutes later and she was just slumped in her chair and embarrassed over the entire thing. The panic was gone.

Then she was fine. She apologised for overreacting, even when I told her it was okay. She said she knew it was an issue, albeit one she was working on to the best of her ability.

It was likely also the first time that I realised that Max was just as mature as I was. Perhaps not emotionally so, but certainly in other aspects. She just finds come situations overwhelming if her emotions get the better of her.

_I need to get off at the next stop._

I do, and the bus heaves away from the sidewalk. I look into my phone and follow the directions it gives, turning down two streets in the process. I glance at the buildings I pass, briefly wondering what sort of people live inside them. Many have front gardens groomed with finely cut grass. Several have outdoor toys laying haphazardly on the ground.

It’s a nice area. All the houses are made from wood, at least superficially. Tame colours adorn the majority of the walls but there is still the odd splash of colour over a few of them. They stop the streets feeling repetitive and mundane.

I then wander past one such house. The lower half of the building is rather plain, but above the front door the entirety of the building is painted a deep blue. A take a few steps more before realising that the number next to the front door is the one I’m looking for.

_44 Cedar Avenue._

There isn’t any obvious movement through the front window of the house. And there aren’t people wandering the street. It’s just me, outside Max’s house.

Well, Chloe’s house.

Or her parents’ house. It’s probably under their name.

But Max still lives there, so it’s her house too.

My ‘Girlfriendz’ house.

I take a deep breath, then exhale. My back feels hot and a part of me would really like to wait until someone from in the house happens to wander outside. But I know that won’t happen so I make my way to the front door.

I stare at the doorbell for several seconds more than someone else might and I press it with my thumb. There’s a shrill sound from behind the door.

And then I wait, shifting back and form on the heels of my feet. My sensible shoes make it easy, which might be why I favour them more than heels. That, and I can’t really walk in anything higher than two inches. I’m not so sure ‘waiting for your Synth girlfriend to finish getting her brain backed up’ is a heel situation either.

I force my head back into the game. Max. Waking up. Chloe.

I can do this.

There’s definite movement behind the door and I suddenly doubt my previous statement. But before anything remotely negative comes out of my head, there’s a girl with very cropped, dirty-blonde hair looking down at me.

“Hey,” she says.

She gives me a quick once over and, as much as I don’t want to admit to it, I do the same to her. My first comment would usually be on the tank top barely clinging to her shoulder, but there’s something sharper that catches my vision.

Her right arm isn’t there. The flesh ends angrily at the shoulder, replaced by a metal arm engraved with many insignias and logos I don’t recognise. One of them might be from a band Alyssa likes, but that’s all I gather.

I’ve seen photos of Chloe, so it shouldn’t come as surprise. I know what she looks like. Max mentioned that Chloe was a cyborg and it wasn’t among my ever growing list of things to worry about when visiting Max.

Chloe having advanced prosthetics isn’t exactly something that could cause me any issue. Max even said that Chloe would talk about it if you asked her.

But now that I see her in person, I suddenly wonder if there’s somewhere else I should be looking. Or maybe that I shouldn’t even be considering her implants at all.

“Kate, right?” she asks, her brow raised. I assume she’s seen a picture of me, at least. Max seems like the kind of girl who’d show her best friend pictures of her girlfriend. Which would be me. “It’s, uh, good to meet you. Max is looking forward to this.”

I frown a little. “Is she finished already?”

“Nah, she’s still out. But she was super hyped yesterday.” She gives me another glance before breaking into a smile. “Get your ass in here. She’ll be done in an hour.”

She turns around towards the hall and makes her way back inside. Much like where her right arm should be, her back is torched by mechanical implements and bleached skin. A heavy column of crafted metal rides up her spine, visible beneath the tank top and connecting right up to the back of her head.

It rides up the whole of her back, disappearing somewhere beneath the waist of her jeans.

I must admit, the sight catches me a little off-guard. I’ve never seen a picture of her back before. I’m not sure what situation would have warranted me seeing her back but now that I am it’s a little jarring.

It's like an armoured snake crafted from steel, clinging through her skin.

But she doesn’t notice. And before she does I make my way into the house behind her. By the time I close the door she’s already vanished into another room and I’m not sure what I should be doing. Isn’t she meant to close the door after I’m inside and take me somewhere to sit?

As if she can read my thoughts, a “Through here!” comes from down the hall.

I end up in a living room. It’s spacious, if not a bit worn in through years of use. There’s a television in one corner and a selection of soft couches scattered here and there. A dining table at one end. A door leading to a garden, complete with swings and patches of brown grass.

No Chloe, though.

“Do you want a Pepsi?”

I turn around to see a joint kitchen. It seems I actually passed by another door that leads into it. I’m sure Chloe had spoken from the living room, though. Maybe she did and I’m just trying to waste some time before I have to respond.

“U-uh-” I begin, rather brilliantly. Very impressive. “No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

I sit on one of the couches. I fall back into the chair when the cushion turns out to be much softer than I anticipated.

“You sure?” she says, coming out of the kitchen. There’s two cans already in her hands and she’s moving to sit next to me in the couch. Then she does sit next to me on the couch. “I mean, it’s right here. Go on, Katie” She shakes it towards me. “Taste the black magic.”

I’m not sure if I’ve known her long enough to like being called Katie. Nor has anyone I know ever called a can of Pepsi ‘black magic’.

What’s going on right now?

“O-okay,” I eventually say.

Chloe smiles and, using her synthetic hand, holds the can with four fingers and effortlessly opens the tab with her middle finger. She proudly offers the can out for me and I can’t help but feel I was only offered the drink so that she could show off to me.

At least I think it was showing off. I’ve never seen anyone else open a can of soda with one hand.

“Thanks.” Quite proud that I didn’t mumble or stutter, I take my Pepsi and take a drink of it. It’s horribly sweet, but not the worst thing in the world.

I just don’t like how it makes my teeth feel all sticky.

Chloe opens her own can the same way she did mine and relaxes back into the couch. She clearly doesn’t mind it on her teeth and takes a long swig before turning back to me.

“So, you’re the one Max has been talking about?”

“I guess so.” Small talk.

And there’s an hour until Max wakes up.

Rather than ask me anything else, she just laughs with a smile. Not cruelly, but brightly. Even if it does sound really cheesy, I feel the weight shifting around my head dissipate.

“Dude, chillax.” She shifts in her chair, though I’m not sure why. “Seriously, I’m not going to eat you or anything.”

It feels less tense in here already.

“I know!” I know. I’m probably just being silly. “Just a little nervous. I haven’t really done the whole ‘meeting the family’ before.”

“If it makes you feel any better, the ‘rents are out and won’t be back till next week.” That…does make me feel a little better. I’ll have to meet them at some point but at least that isn’t today! “And I don’t really give a shit about anything so you’re pretty good in my book as long as you don’t burn my house down.”

…Okay?

We fall into a sort of silence after that. I sit there, twiddling the hem of my dress and Chloe briefly turns to face the TV. She said she ‘doesn’t give a shit’ but, beneath the short hair and casual clothes, she doesn’t seem to know what to say to me either.

She does keep looking at me from the corner of her eye, though. Part of me wonders if she knows _exactly_ what she’s doing and she’s just trying her best to make sure that I think otherwise.

I join her in watching the TV, if only to fill in the time. I’m not sure if I recognise it. Maybe it’s a James Bond film? I think he’s the right actor; I remember seeing a picture of him walking out from the sea inside a magazine.

Mother was furious that I’d even looked at it. The topless man was one thing, but she never approved of films over my age-limit. I’m not sure whether she thought one was worse than the other.

But now there’s an ad for luminous hair follicle implants on the screen and Chloe turns all her attention back to me.

“I know the ad looks like trash but those implants are on point.” Her head motions towards the screen before she pulls at her short hair and reveals the base of her scalp. Sure enough, there’s a faint blue where her hair meets the skin. “I got the spectral blue ones a month back and they’re fucking awesome. My entire head looks like a galaxy at night."

I…want to see that. I’ve never seen anyone with proper luminous body modifications unless they’re on TV. I’ve met people with them, but I don’t exactly go out enough at night to see it all in action. I’m not really the clubbing type. And the one time I did go didn’t end all that well.

“You got any mods?” she asks me.

I really hope I don’t come off as boring, but “I don’t have anything, sorry. My mom never really let me or my sisters look into that kind of stuff when everything was coming out. I’ve just sort of stuck with that, I guess.”

“Yeah, Max said your parents were pretty strict.”

“My dad’s okay.” I’m not sure what Max has said, but I feel a mighty need to defend my parents. Even if my mom is the kind of person who didn’t let us have locks on our doors until we were fourteen. “He’s okay with pretty much anything if you explain it over a cup of coffee.”

“My dad’s the same!” she replies, laughing. “My mom freaks about a lot of stuff but my dad just sort of takes it. As long as it doesn’t burn down his house.”

“I thought it was your house?”

“It is _currently_ my house. And again, everything’s cool with me if you don’t burn it down.” Her eyes turn gentler, less casual. “So stop freaking out, okay?”

But…

“I-I didn’t-”

“You didn’t need to say anything. You look terrified and I feel like I’m a big angry bear or something.”

You’re not a bear, Chloe.

I mean…at least not physically. You’re a little intimidating, if only because you’re someone that I’m not. I can’t picture myself with tattoos or hair in anything more outrageous than a bob. I can’t even picture myself with modified hair.

“You’re not a bear.”

“That’s a good start.”

“No, I mean, you’re fine. I’m fine.” I’m just being weird. If Max was here when I’d met Chloe I’m pretty sure I’d be fine. “I’m fine.”

“You’re fine, then?”

“Yes,” I answer. Confidently, this time. More or less. “I’m fine. So…” Now I need to prove that I’m fine. Because I’m fine. “What other mods do you have? Do you have a lot?”

“Well, arm and my legs are a given. Obviously,” she says, far more casually than I would have. I suddenly feel horrid for even asking my question. I wouldn’t have called any of those body mods but…well, she apparently does. I might be a little outdated. But Max did say that Chloe didn’t mind talking about her implants so I take those words to heart. Chloe seems fine, so I am too. “And my hair. A few of my tats. I used to tan myself but it just looked fugly. I grew out of it.”

“I don’t suit a tan either. I just burn.”

“Oh, no. I suited it. I rocked it,” she cheers. “I just looked at myself one day and thought it was really stupid. Same with my tattoos. You just want to change sometimes; you know?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I’m not sure I do. I haven’t changed all that much since high school. Same style of clothes, same interests. I remember wanting pink and blue hair when I was younger but that idea was shot down. And then I grew out of wanting it.

I just like who I am, most days. I like my blouses and my comfy shoes. I don’t really have to prove anything to anyone. I’ll happily run my abstinence club even if there’s only four other members. I don’t really care if other people don’t like the way I think. Or the way I am.

As long as they respect me then I will do my best to respect them. I’m not always the best at it but I try to always do the right thing. Everyone is a person like me, after all. We’re just into different things.

Apart from Victoria. She’s just a big…mean type of human. Really mean.

“I wanted pink and blue hair when I was eight,” I finally say. It’s somewhat related. “Just some highlights. It was one of the early mods. The cotton candy one?”

“No idea.”

“Well, I thought it as nice. It wasn’t anything exciting, which is why I thought mom might let me have it. But she said no and that sort of stuck. My sisters didn’t try asking after I did.”

She takes another sip of her Pepsi and frowns at me. “Man, that sucks.”

“A little. At the time,” I add. “But my mom bought me my violin and I love playing that. I begged for that for months.”

“That sounds cool. You good at the violin?”

Max says I am. So do a few other people I know, which is always nice. Max has even asked me to play, even if she can’t quite get to grips with how the notes make her feel. Which is strange, given how much she likes certain genres of music. She said she was getting to grips with guitar, last time we spoke about music.

“Max thinks I am,” I say with a slight smile pulling at my lips. Chloe catches me and looks at me knowingly. “A-and my friends.”

“You said Max first.”

True. Very true. But Max’s opinion seems to mean a little more to me these days. It’s only been around two months but things seem to be going well, I think. A little faster than I might have expected, but well.

“Maybe I did,” I reply, trying on a bit of confidence. I sip at my Pepsi with all the dignity that one can while drinking Pepsi. “She’s nice.”

Not my best line. It’s true, though. Max is very nice.

Very, very nice.

“Yeah, she is.”

Then something occurs to me. I’m with Chloe, we’re speaking. It’s casual. It seems like a good time to ask.

“How long have you known her?” I ask.

She looks at me a little funny, but in the end she just shrugs. Max said she moved in after Chloe’s ‘accident’ but I’ve never really heard anything from another perspective. It’s always ‘I’ve known Chloe since she was little’ and not much else.

I’m not prying, honest. Something new about Max is always interesting to hear. Especially since I don’t have many people who actually knew her before we met.

“Since I was a kid,” she starts. “I mean, kinda. Dad knew a guy called Ryan Caulfield back ‘in the day’.” She even quotes the air with her fingers. “He got stuck under a forklift while he was at work and busted both of his legs. Like, super busted. Needed everything below his knees replaced. Dad and some other guys put money in to get Ryan a decent Personal Care Droid.”

“And that was Max?”

“Yeah. He didn’t need Max around twenty-four seven so I’d talk to her whenever I was dragged to their house. I didn’t have much else to do while I was there and it was fun, just talking to a robot and shit. It was all cool and new back then.

“I liked talking to her and she liked doing stuff that wasn’t the stuff she was made to do,” she says, before briefly pausing. “Okay, I lied; she liked talking. She didn’t want to do anything else until Ryan started getting used to his legs. But once she started to do things she wasn’t made to do, she liked doing it. Then she moved away I never saw her for a billion years.”

The last bit catches me off guard. The words themselves would have been enough, but there’s a weight to her words that I probably wouldn’t have caught if she wasn’t talking about Max.

“She moved away?”

“Well, Ryan moved away. His wife got a transfer at work and Max was their PCD,” she explains, shrugging. “So she went with them. Max wasn’t all there yet so she didn’t really try to write all that much.”

“Oh,” I reply. “Was that it until you had your…uh, accident?”

“Pretty much. Max give you the whole spiel?”

I shake my hand in the air, hopefully signifying how little Max went into details. Max didn’t tell me everything but, at the same time, I wouldn’t really expect her to. “Bits. Not much. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want-”

She seems to think on my words for as little time as possible before she keeps talking as she did before. “Basically, I got new car for my sixteenth. Few days later some dick in a massive truck hits me off the road and boom; I only have one working arm. Seriously sucked to be me for a while there.”

That sounds like an understatement.

“Mom and Dad couldn’t really afford a Droid after the crash so Ryan was all ‘Hey, I can walk now. How about you have Max?’ so she came back here. We put all her gear in the spare room and she did for me what she did for Ryan. Now she lives there.”

She breaks back into that same smile from before. That smile that makes you wonder if she has something planned and, if she does, you _know_ it won’t end well for you. It could be a prank. It could mean eternal embarrassment!

Either way, it’s not a smile you want to see on somebody. Especially your girlfriend’s best friend.

“And now she’s got a _girlfriend_ ,” she teases. She wiggles her fingers towards me. “I feel like a big sister. Seriously, this is cool.”

I just hope she doesn’t try and give me a ‘talk’ about not hurting Max. Chloe looks like she knows wrestling and I don’t know wrestling. To further that end, I bring the topic back around to Max. I’ve already learnt one new thing and I’ve barely been here half an hour.

“Did you not expect Max to get a girlfriend?”

“I’m not sure what I expected,” she replied, once again drinking from her can. “We looked online about all the stuff that could happen to her and there’s a pretty big fucking list of things that can happen. She might not have ever dated at all. She might have had a mental breakdown a few days in. She could have turned into a sugar plum princess. Getting a girlfriend is, like, the least of the things I was worried about.”

I suppose I would be worried about that too. I never knew Max before she got the update but it must be kind of scary not knowing how your friend is going to start acting. I know her interests and beliefs wouldn’t have changed but she could have suddenly become very glum and stayed that way. Or she could have become the peppiest peep that ever peeped.

Or a ‘sugar plum fairy’, I suppose.

Then again, her emotions come and go so quickly that I could still see something like that happening. We could meet up one day and all she’ll be is a moody so-and-so. It hasn’t happened yet but I’m pretty sure it might one day.

“I mean, she still comes and goes a lot,” Chloe suddenly says. “It was rough for her early on. About a week in after getting her update, Max was watching this cartoon on TV. I wandered past the screen for, like, half a second and she threw a tantrum. Totally flipped her shit. She was throwing cushions at me and using some really inventive swear words. Then she calmed down and just cried to me for at _least_ an hour.”

That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Max at the restaurant. I guess it really is something that’s taking her time to work through. It’s a blessing I learned all of this as a baby because I doubt I could handle having anxiety for the first time in my life whilst in university. That just seems like a bad idea in general.

Dealing with lecturers and new emotions at the same time…that can’t be pretty. Dealing with Victoria wouldn’t be as easy, either.

“But she’s getting better,” I say. “She knows when she’s having meltdowns and she tries her best to deal with them.”

“Yeah, she’s awesome. That shits hard to deal with. I help her out with all the stuff I can but I don’t really want her to turn out like me.” Max said that when we first met, actually. I remember that. “It’s cool that she has friends and a girlfriend now; means she has more people to get used to things with.”

"Why don't you want her to turn out like you?"

"Don't get me wrong; I'm pretty awesome. But things were so fucking hard after my accident. I get angry for stupid shit and piss off a lot of people. It works for me but I don't want Max acting like that. I don't want her doing stupid shit just because I like doing it."

Part of me wonders if that should for Max to decide, but I see what Chloe means. She really is like a big sister to Max, in a way. She wants what's best for her.

"I'm sure she could be a little like you. You don't seem too bad."

"You've known me for forty minutes," she laughs. "Thanks for the vote of confidence there, Katie, but you might not be saying that in a few months."

She drinks from her Pepsi can once more before completely crushing it with her bionic grip. Still one-handed.

I've barely even touched mine. I take another sip, hoping I don't look ungrateful. I'm sure Chloe isn't the kind of person who would care, either way. For all the faults she mentioned, she seems nice. Not the usual kind if person I would hang out with, but nice.

"Right," she eventually says, getting up and heading towards the kitchen. I hear the distinct clunk of her soda cam hitting a pile of others before she returns. She motions her head towards the hall. "Come on, Max is due up soon. Sometimes she finishes up early"

Like a lot of computer processes, I muse. I nod and get up from the couch, taking my two-thirds full can with me. Chloe leads me out of the living room and down through the hall to another door.

It's pretty nondescript, as far as doors go. No more or less decorated than the rest of the house. Chloe opens it and ushers me inside.

The inside isn't quite so nondescript.

Given how deep into pop culture Max seems to be, I wasn't sure whether to expect a bedroom filled with geeky paraphernalia or a storage room for all of her equipment. What I see before me is a mixture of both.

Around the walls are shelves littered with books, figures, games and knickknacks. Like with everything Max talks about, there are some I recognise and some I don't. There's a few small anime figures gathered in one space and a neat collection of novels over several shelves. A robotic helmet with teardrop eyes and sits next to a photo frame.

There are games sitting by her computer and several different styles of console controller in a jumbled pile of plastic and cable. Everything has a place, but that place doesn't necessarily seem to be neat.

But what really calls my attention is a large bed in the middle of the room. You could mistake it for a hospital bed; a separate computer is sat to the side, a lone blue cable leading from its patient as pieces of presumably important information flicker on screen before vanishing. Each snippet of text that completes its task pushes a green bar further towards the goal of one-hundred percent.

And there's Max on the bed itself, her eyes closed and the blue cable plugged into the access port on the side of her head.

I'm suddenly very unsure of what to say. I know Max is okay, and I know this happens to her on a monthly basis. But my initial reaction I still holding. It does feel very much like a hospital bed.

I hear Chloe shuffling behind me. I turn and I see her bringing a folding chair into the room. She sets it down next to the computer desk and motions for me to join her.

I nod and sit in the swivel chair at the desk. It's comfy, I have to admit.

"You okay?" Chloe asks.

"Yeah," I reply, truthfully. "Just a little strange seeing her hooked up to a machine. It's kind of scary."

"She does this all the time. She sometimes does it early if something she doesn't want to forget happens. It's just a thing she does. Don't sweat about it."

I don't. I might ask Max about it later to ease my mind, but I push the thoughts away until then. I don't want to look worried she she wakes. I want her to see how excited I am. I want her to see how much this means to me.

With that in mind, I peer over to the machine plugged into Max's head. I don't understand a lot of the information listed, but the green bar and the percentage next to it is all I need.

Ninety-eight percent.

Me and Chloe sit in a comfortable silence. Well, I do; she's checking her phone with one hand and swishing her bionic fingers through the air every few seconds, issuing commands to the screen that I can't see.

Despite the trauma of losing your limbs, it must be a little fun using your hands to interact with technology. I have no idea what else Chloe can do, but I know she could operate most of her kitchen appliances if she bought the Connection Packs for it. She could play games too, I suppose.

Or maybe she only uses her phone. She might not care all that much. Or maybe the accident was more detrimental than she lets on.

I have no idea. I've only just met her. Still, its intriguing to watch out of the corner of my eye. I don't want to offend, but I've never seen it all that much before. Hopefully the novelty of it wears off soon. I don't want to stare at her.

The next time I glance at the screen the percentage has changed again. Ninety-nine.

The information begins to slow, the amount on screen depleting. Single lines of code appear on separate rows and Max begins to move the fingers on her left hand.

Then her right hand. It's…honestly a little creepy. I can't help but think of Frankenstein’s monster and the famous image if fingered twitching and muscles waking up.

I forget I thought about it. I'm here for Max.

“Her body’s just making sure it can still everything. Give her a few seconds.”

Her body whirrs with each new motion until every joint has had its turn. There's a brief glimmer of ‘complete’ on the screen before it settles onto a default page of settings and choices.

Then Max opens her eyes.

They do so suddenly, not at all like someone waking up from a long sleep. If I didn't know better, I'd think she'd woke from a nightmare. But her features are placid and she's moving her arms to push herself up.

But I smile, because that doesn't really matter. I'll get used to it. It may not be normal for me, but it's perfectly natural for her. And I'm still excited, because the waiting is over.

“Kate!”

She scrambles over from her bed and lunges for me. I almost flinch for a moment, but then I find her sat on my lap with her arms around my neck. Comfortably around my neck.

Chloe’s snickering to my side but I ignore her for the time being. I highly doubt she means anything by it, but nothing is going to stop me enjoying this moment.

“Hey sleepyhead,” I say, hugging her back. Despite all my silly fears and worries up until now, there's one thing I know for sure. “I've missed you.”


End file.
